Integrative approaches to data management and modeling in environmental photobiology

Understanding the behavior of light-driven organisms in their natural environment is a key to numerous sustainable biotechnologies, and requires the integration of knowledge obtained on many spatial and temporal scales. This in turn, is a source for ‘science friction’, the difficulties in the interoperation of two scientific disciplines in related problems. In this talk, I will present two studies addressing interoperability challenges in environmental photobiology: one features the development of a bioinformatics platform for the storage, assembly, and annotation of expressed sequence tags of the cork oak, in which we aimed for a high transparency of the data workflow, from the RNA sample to the final annotation. The other study addresses the data storage, analysis and modeling of light-driven microbial communities, the so-called phototrophic biofilms. Here, we probed the role of concepts from the Semantic Web in ecological data management, and their assess their potential for the integration of different types of biofilm models, from individual-based approaches to descriptions using partial, impulsive or qualitative differential equations.